The 2012 Codex by Gary Jennings

Author:Gary Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

50

As I walked the beach, a sense of dread and impending doom chased me like a rabid dog snapping at my heels. Dark thoughts placed in my head by the strange man who called himself a “Spaniard” taunted me.

I went back to the heart of the city, knowing that I had not struck him in anger.

But in fear.

His crazed words and the mad, passionate conviction with which he spoke them frightened and panicked me. He was a lunatic. No sane man would have even imagined the strange things he spoke of. Still, he described these things with a certitude I could not deny.

And I had already encountered places and people beyond my comprehension.

A man makes a big mistake when he thinks he’s seen everything, the maniac had said.

I was shaken by those words.

I could not truly disprove his statements, because I had not seen everything he had. Given my ignorant upbringing, I understood better than most. In hard truth, none of us knew the world from which he came—not our king, not our priests.

Destruction of the One-World had happened four times in the past. What he had described was another destruction of the One-World, this time by conquest.

His demented diatribes haunted me. Why? It hit me all at once: He is intelligent.

Jeronimo was not a raving derelict wandering the streets, begging for handouts, and taunted by children. He had mastered our language in a remarkably short time and adapted to our lifestyle. Defying our priests and refusing to accept our gods, he had still avoided the sacrificial altar and held a high position as the head accountant to a rich merchant, a task that involved dealing with many people about valuable goods.

He had also not been irrational in any way except when he talked about the land of his people. When he spoke about the treatment he and his companions received when they were washed ashore, he had been angry, but his anger was justified.

An intelligent, rational madman who spoke of the end of the One-World in a short time? An invasion of invincible warriors on giant deer, brought to our shores in canoes the size of palaces and capable of destroying cities with weapons that shot huge objects? Was that what I was to report to Lord Janaab?

On a dark, morbid, overcast day, I left Tulúm.

Still no life-giving rain fell.

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